Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Is fresh pasta better than dried?

Bronze spaghetti dies at Rustichella.

Fresh or dried pasta, which is better?

Frankly, I don’t know
if this is a debate or not. If it is I’m sure it ranks low on the scale of
disputes, somewhere far beneath the controversy over whether water should be
served with or without ice. Still, it is a question that comes up — and almost always I find that folks assume fresh
pasta is better. That if you had the time and wherewithal you should use fresh
pasta over dried 100% of the time. Maybe that's because it’s more work to make
(if you make the pasta at home). Maybe it’s because fresh pasta is more
fragile, more perishable and therefore more precious. Maybe it’s because dried seems more industrial, more
like a commodity and can sell for so little.

Whatever the story behind the
myth, it’s not true. Fresh pasta is not better than dried. It’s just
different. There are many times when dried pasta is preferable. Use dried pasta when you
want to enjoy noodles with a lot of texture and flavor; use fresh when you want
a softer, subtler dish.

Dried and fresh pasta are made very differently, hence
the different results and different uses in the kitchen. Traditional dried
pasta is made by extruding durum semolina dough through bronze dies. It’s dried
at relatively low temperatures for a couple days. The bronze-die extrusion
leaves the pasta with a rough hewn texture. You can feel it in your mouth and
the sauce really grips to it. The slow drying ferments the flour a bit. It
transforms the dough from tasting like raw flour to something more like bread.

In
contrast, fresh pasta is usually rolled and cut and there is no fermentation.
The texture is much softer, smoother and the flavor is less intense,
more like flour.

It’s important to note when I talk about dried pasta I’m not
talking about any old dried pasta. There are only a handful of companies that
do dried pasta right. (My two favorites are Martelli and Rustichella.) Most
dried pasta is industrially made with exasperating shortcuts that leave it
tasting unexceptional. In particular, they employ hot, short drying times so
there is no transformation of the dough’s flavor. It tastes like flour. Worse,
it’s flour with a burnt edge to the flavor. The extra hot ovens singe the
surface in a way Martelli and Rustichella’s do not. To see what I mean taste a
piece of uncooked commercially made De Cecco pasta (one of the better industrial
companies) and Martelli spaghetti next to each other. The flavor is remarkably
different.